Composing a Further Life

political engagement has been taken over by the religious right, with a very different kind of focus.
    I had been trying to get a sense of how these historic shifts affected different age-groups. Jim was forty-two when he went to St. John’s, having had the experience of going from a privileged childhood to an awareness of issues of social justice and then seeing much of the enthusiasm dissipated. “A lot of people were in a sense orphaned,” I said to him, “so they had to find new ways to be. New ways to express their commitment, new communities to work with, people who—I mean, you used the word
cynicism;
but all those people didn’t just meet this transition by becoming cynical. There must be lots of people my age who remember what it was like to feel that they could repair things. And then lost that. And I wonder sometimes whether they could come back. I don’t know that they’d come back to the churches. I don’t know that they’d put it in religious terms, but whatever it is, to become less cynical.”
    “Oh, I think so,” Jim said. “But I think this is an institutional crisis as opposed to just a church crisis. At times we had almost absolute faith in certain institutions, and that’s changed. They still believe in the Spirit, maybe some of the forms are different, but that the Spirit is real and change is possible, and it’s going to mean a different avenue.… I work with people like that, and they are some of the people who are in seminary now, but the ways it fuels them are different from twenty years ago. You’ve got to have institutions and structures to make things work, but our structures are so different now. I mean, my God, just think of the Internet.… You don’t even have to have a degree; you can get what you need to know in other forms. So the stuff that’s at our disposal is different. The vehicles are different.”
    Jim’s mention of the Internet reminded me of his description of the importance of connecting action and reflection in the training program in Chicago. “My sense is that people’s lives are organized in ways that give them less and less opportunity for reflection, except for those who have recognized that problem and taken on a meditation practice, a spiritual practice of some sort. I see people working terribly hard, on the cell phone all the time, logging in on their computers all the time, just caught in a constant flow of information, demand, expectation, and not having the time or not making the time to reflect on what they’re doing.”
    In 1971, Paul Moore, the priest whose lecture on St. Martin of Tours had inspired Jim’s original interest in social justice issues, became the Episcopal bishop of New York, and Jim became dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine the next year. As Jim described this transition, I could hear him struggling to explain why he wanted to leave the work in Chicago. “I loved being at the Urban Training Center, but I didn’t see it as a life vocation, so to speak. I really was a very sort of faithful priest, … a tight-assed Episcopalian, you know, this was the true church.… So I was very excited about St. John’s. It was a kind of coming home, a bigger and better home than I’d ever lived in before. This really makes me think. It was the frustrated architect in me. Here was the unfinished cathedral, right on the border of Harlem, and you could do all kinds of incredible stuff.”
    Jim approached his task at the huge, unfinished Gothic cathedral on Amsterdam Avenue with sweeping gusto and blithe opportunism, and it quickly became one of the liveliest institutions in New York City, stimulating sweat equity projects in Harlem through the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board and at the same time welcoming Sufi dancers and a homeless shelter, Buddhist monks and most of the Big Apple Circus, art exhibits and a tank of muddy water from the Hudson River to represent the sacred challenge of environmental stewardship. Among the artists in residence at the cathedral was Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist who had contrived to dance between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 and now brought his message of graceful balance to the nave of St. John’s—a metaphor, perhaps, of the tension between the material and the spiritual. Peacocks came to live in the wooded cathedral close, and liberation theologians made their case from the pulpit.
    Connecting things is for me one key meaning of composing, as women have